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- For nearly a quarter century, the Sohn Conference has brought together the best and the brightest in the investment world to pitch their ideas in front of thousands of their peers, spring-boarding many into industry-wide name recognition.
- Six years ago, the conference began its "Next Wave" series, which features rising stars in the hedge-fund game.
- We profiled the five-person class — the most diverse yet.
If you want to make a name for yourself in the hedge-fund game, you could start with presenting an investment idea at the Sohn Conference.
The high-profile event has been attended by thousands of investors every year for the past 24 years. This year's headlining speakers include DoubleLine CEO Jeffrey Gundlach, D1 Capital Partners founder Daniel Sundheim, and Glenview Capital founder Larry Robbins.
But for the past six years, the conference has put rising stars on the stage as a part of its "Next Wave" series to pitch their best investment ideas. Past participants include Tourbillon founder Jason Karp and former Blue Mountain Capital portfolio manager David Zorub, who is starting his own fund.
For the first time, a majority of the "Next Wave" presenters will not be white men, in an industry where less fewer than 5% of hedge funds are owned by women and fewer than 10% are owned by minorities, according to a report from Bella Research Group and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
The five speakers are Angela Aldrich, the founder of Bayberry Capital; Todd Westhus, the founder of Olympus Peak Capital; Parvinder Thiara, the founder of Athanor Capital; Lauren Nicole Wolfe, the cofounder of Impactive Capital; and Matthew Smith, the founder of Deep Basin Capital.
Learn more about them before you listen to their pitches.
Angela Aldrich, the founder of Bayberry Capital, is excited about short bets.
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Angela Aldrich always wanted to work for a hedge fund. The Duke grad worked in Goldman Sachs' investment-banking division after college, with a focus on making it to a hedge fund, and got her first taste when her boss at Goldman, Byron Trott, started BDT Capital in 2009.
After working two years for Trott, Aldrich enrolled in Stanford Business School but kept her foot in the industry by interning for John Griffin's Blue Ridge Capital.
She ended up working at Blue Ridge for four years after finishing at Stanford, and it was where she "learned how to short," she said in an interview with Business Insider.
See more: Investors are jumping back into hedge funds as they prepare for a stock-market drop
That focus on the short side of the portfolio — Bayberry invests long and short in small- and mid-cap companies — is what Aldrich believes sets her new fund apart. Bayberry, which has more than $150 million in assets and counts Griffin as a backer, launched in April and has four employees at the moment.
She hopes to keep the fund small so that she can continue to "play in the most exciting space" of small- and mid-cap companies and plans to present a short at the conference that is "relatively controversial, definitely on the spicier side of the spectrum."
The headwinds facing the industry, and long-short equity funds in particular, have not dampened Aldrich's dream of working at a hedge fund.
"It's a particularly exciting time to be in long-short equity, especially after such a long bull run," she said.
Todd Westhus, the founder of Olympus Peak Capital, has been involved in some of the biggest global financial moments of the past decade.
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Todd Westhus does not think all his ideas are going to work out. The former Perry Capital and Avenue Capital portfolio manager is more focused on placing his bets on ideas that will either win big if his hypothesis is right or have a soft landing if he's wrong.
"I don't care if I'm right or wrong: I care about how much I can make when I'm right and how much I'll lose if I'm wrong," Westhus told Business Insider. The Duke grad forced his way into the hedge-fund world by walking into Avenue Capital's offices in 2002 and asking for an interview. Until that point, Westhus had been in investment-banking programs at JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley.
"How does someone without any experience get a job at a fund?" he said.
After working at Avenue for four years, he joined Perry Capital, where he has been involved in some of the biggest global financial moments of the past decade: Westhus had a multibillion short on the subprime housing market, placed macro bets when the eurozone was in crisis thanks to Greece's economy crumbling, and invested in Argentina while the country was defaulting on its debt.
See more: Investors are hot on hedge funds again, but old-school stock pickers are getting left in the cold
"At any other fund I would have been siloed," he said, adding he was thankful for Perry letting him "roam."
Those experiences, Westhus said, are the guiding principles of his new firm, Olympus Peak Capital, which has $600 million, but expects to be closer to $750 million by the end of the summer thanks to a couple of large institutional investors that have signed on. "Our strategy is just to be flexible," he said.
Part of that flexibility requires the fund to not get too big, and Westhus said he does not want the fund to get bigger than $1 billion. His former billionaire bosses, Marc Lasry of Avenue Capital and Richard Perry of Perry Capital, are both backers of his new firm.
He didn't reveal much about what his presentation at Sohn will be on beyond saying "it will be controversial."
Parvinder Thiara, the founder of Athanor Capital, is building from the ground up.
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With about $1 billion in assets and a staff of 20, Parvinder Thiara's Athanor Capital looks to be on steady ground less than two years after beginning trading. What those numbers don't show, Thiara said in an interview with Business Insider, is how tricky it is to get there.
"The hardest thing that people underestimate is attracting top-tier talent, because you're starting out and competing with top funds for these people," he said.
Thiara was at D.E. Shaw before starting Athanor and has several D.E. Shaw alums on his staff, including COO and chief compliance officer Hilario Ramos. The macro relative value fund's main investors so far have been endowments and foundations, sovereign wealth funds and pension funds, according to Gabriela Teodorescu Bockhaus, Athanor's head of marketing.
Despite large investors already jumping into the fund, Thiara said "we don't have grand visions to become a huge hedge fund with dozens of different strategies."
"Our main aim is to deliver alpha, and to have fun as a team while we do so."
The having-fun part was admittedly tough for Thiara as he worked to get his fund off the ground. "It's stressful, it's hard, but when it comes together, it's worth it," he said.
Now, he says, he sees the "a unique satisfaction that comes from building something from the ground up."
His Sohn presentation will be a macro pitch, not a stock, which he thinks will make it less controversial than some of the other speeches of the day. Still, he expects it to be "certainly different" than anything else presented.
See the rest of the story at Business Insider